


put on a show

by grayimperia



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, Spoilers, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 07:16:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10939617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayimperia/pseuds/grayimperia
Summary: [Major V3 spoilers]Ouma plays the role he was always meant for, and nothing else matters.A little broken heart never killed anyone, after all.





	put on a show

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for all of V3

Saihara has a habit of covering his mouth with his hand when he’s deep in thought. Ouma tilts his head at him, tips of his stiff, dyed hair brushing the top of Tojo’s once sparklingly cleaned table. Of course, Tojo’s been dead for days, so he supposes that doesn’t really matter. 

He cracks a joke about that to Saihara, and the other boy doesn’t shake his head at him. He just brings up a pale hand to cover his mouth. Ouma prods, “C’mon, Saihara-chan—aren’t you going to scold me? A game’s no fun if only one person’s playing.”

Saihara slowly places his hand back in his lap. He’s done thinking, and his chosen words are, “That’s what this is about. You just want someone to pay attention to you?”

Ouma puffs out his cheeks. “I want _you_ to pay attention to me.”

And then he frowns. “I am. You’re pretty hard to ignore, Ouma-kun.”

Ouma leans back in his chair, arms folded behind his head. “Maybe. But you always find a way.”

“Ouma-kun?” Saihara asks, far too concerned for Ouma’s comfort. “I don’t—”

So he waves a hand. “It’s fine. If you don’t think I’m worth paying attention to, then I must be pretty boring.” Then he winks. “And I certainly can’t have my beloved Saihra-chan start thinking I’m boring.”

He wants Saihara to sigh and shake his head and tell him to stop playing games. But instead, Saihara raises a hand to his chin, and furrows his brow, and says, “You don’t need to put on another act, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Then the sigh comes. “I just would like to be able to get to see the real you sometimes.” 

Ouma just grins and ignores the arrow that drives straight through his heart. 

“Tell me what you want the real Ouma to be,” he says. “And I’ll find the perfect lie.”

Saihara frowns. “That’s not what I just said.”

“No,” and Ouma’s smile grows cruel. “But it’s what you want.”

-

Gonta dies bleeding and burning and so terribly confused at it all. The fire from his pyre flickers in Ouma’s round, bright eyes, and he knows there is no going back from this sacrifice. Iruma’s face had shown blue and Gonta’s red, and Ouma pulls out all the stops for each and every demonic expression he can make to demolish any doubts that he is truly the villain they’ve all expected him to be. 

Momota falls to the ground, bleeding over his own lies and wounded pride, and Ouma knows it’s his very best performance when he knocks everyone’s hero down. 

He takes credit for everything, and Maki’s threatening him with a knife instead of just her hands, and Gonta’s dead, and he lies and lies and lies. 

And everything is absolutely perfect.

It still hurts when Saihara can’t see through him. But a little broken heart never killed anyone.

-

The world became real when they found Amami with his skull bashed in. Kaede and Saihara take charge, because he’s the detective, and he’s been attached to her hip since day one. Kaede’s hand leads the investigation, and he follows obediently behind her. 

At the trial, Ouma concocts his own theory on the spot to push the real culprit out of hiding. Saihara closes his mouth and doesn’t open it again—a ready and willing decoy like none Ouma has ever seen before. But Kaede loves Saihara too much, and he loves her, and she lies to fight against Ouma’s lies, and lets her escape route collapse around her.

Her face grows blue, and Saihara becomes a new person, and her every attempt at murder is forgiven in time with the swings of her lifeless body. 

But it doesn’t matter because Kaede is dead, dead, dead. Saihara still loves her, but Ouma doodles pictures on his whiteboard at night and says that doesn’t matter either. 

-

Saihara plays games with him sometimes. He frowns and sighs and seems so tired with Ouma’s every trick and lie. But Ouma waves him goodbye one day, and Saihara comes back the next because together they’re a detective and a mystery and those things just go together. So Ouma decides to take the brightest, sharpest knife he can find from the kitchen and drive it straight through one of his fingers. 

Saihara takes care of him—because he’d take care of anybody—and Ouma makes sure to send him a wave with all of his fingers wiggling the next day. Saihara looks him in the eyes, round and glassy like a doll’s, and says, “You’re so reckless.”

“Oh?” he places his bandaged finger to his lips. “Are you worried about me?”

Ouma doesn’t expect him to answer that question, but Saihara becomes a mystery of his own when he says, “Yes. Of course, I am.”

The words are too real, so Ouma makes them fake. “Ah, I knew it! My beloved Saihara-chan is so torn up thinking about me. And that means,” his face darkens, “I’m in your very thoughts, so I must own your heart completely.” 

And Saihara just frowns, placing his hand over his mouth. So Ouma tilts his head and asks, “Oh? Is something wrong, Saihara-chan?”

“No,” he says. “Sorry. I’m just wondering who that lie was for.”

Alone in his room, Ouma turns his pen over and over in his hands and worries the bandage wrapped around his finger over and over again, the physical proof that someone cares scarred into his body.

Shinguji just killed two sweet girls in cold blood, and Ouma marks that down on his whiteboard. As much as he wants to, he could never pretend to be a villain like that. And he vows to himself it’s absolutely not because Saihara took his heart in his hands and drove a knife through it like tissue paper. 

Ouma writes down Shinguji’s crimes, and wishes he was better at lying to himself. 

Then Ouma kills two people of his own, and Saihara doesn’t come to play games with him anymore. But that’s a small loss. 

He lost Saihara before he even had him, after all.

-

It rains one day in the cage. Ouma stares out at the dormitory for an upstairs window, and sees Momota jogging back to their rooms to wakeup Saihara for the day. A smile plays across his lips, and he thinks how cute it is that Saihara is always the last one up, emerging from his room, still thick with the veil of sleep after Momota rings his doorbell, once, twice, ten times over. 

The rain hammers down on the ground, and he spies Yumeno and Kiibo, and then Shirogane later by herself, all run to the school. He doesn’t see Maki, but, of course, he wasn’t looking for Maki. 

Then Momota bursts through the doors, coat like the night sky held high over his head, and too widespread to only be protecting one person. Ouma sees Saihara’s smaller form next to him, and his smile vanishes as soon as it had appeared. 

The glass is cold, and runs through his hair like a lover’s hand when he leans his head against it. His eyes calmly follow Momota and Saihara, laughing and running through the storm.

Then Ouma takes a deep breath and reminds himself who he is and what role he has to play. 

-

His neck is alight with purple bruises the morning after Maki tried to strangle him in front of ten people who all silently let it happen. Ouma experimentally runs his fingers like feathers over one of them and pretends it doesn’t hurt as much as it does. 

Part of him has to applaud his own acting prowess. Even after witnessing Maki nearly choke him to death, everyone still sees him as the villain of their story. Of course, Ouma would come to think almost all his classmates are blind. Because after Kaede died to end the game, nobody talks about the hidden door or the mastermind and they turn on each other in a rabid frenzy, painting the walls of the game bright with blood. 

And he says, ‘almost all’ because Saihara stands up from among the others and catches him red handed slipping hints and playing games and taking everyone’s hatred onto himself. 

Ouma ties his scarf around his sore neck, and when Saihara comes to see him that day, he shyly points a finger to his own, and says, “Does it still hurt?”

“Nope,” Ouma regards his fingernails. “Please, it’d take way more than that to kill me.”

“Ouma-kun,” he begins. “Please don’t say things like that.”

He folds his hands behind his head. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to get yourself killed,” Saihara answers far too earnestly.

Ouma holds up the masquerade the best way he knows how. “Ah, don’t go lying to make me feel special, Saihara-chan,” he says. “You’d say that about anyone.”

And he says, “I would. I don’t want any of my friends to die.”

So Ouma bites his tongue when Saihara stands in front of Momota, and points one shaking finger at him and says. “You’re pathetic. Momota-kun has everyone on his side, and you have no one.”

The performance becomes so much harder after that, and alone in his room, Ouma desperately does not want to think of why.

-

Iruma and Gonta are both dead because Ouma still has a shred of hope of making it out of this game alive.

He’s alone in the machinery bay. Momota’s busy at the window he thinks Ouma doesn’t know about, receiving presents and words of encouragement from all his friends come to cheer on their favorite hero.

Ouma sits quietly and frantically plans a way to stop the killing game and find the mastermind laughing at all the blood on his hands. He’s in an absolutely endless maze, and every door before him leads to death. The answer is somewhere, and he holds out his hands, reaching with every ounce of strength he has left. But he can’t let anyone know that. That would ruin everything he’s destroyed himself for.

Everything goes up in flames anyway, and Ouma’s left wondering _why, why, why_ the world won’t let him have one success that doesn’t end in blood.

Maki shoots him with a crossbow, and Ouma writes a speech for Momota, giving him the perfect lines to say when everyone will inevitably panic at the thought of him under the press. Ouma doesn’t bother to write any answers for what to say in the event that anyone expresses horror at the thought of that gory death going to him.

He shivers with the sharp pain singing in his veins, and doesn’t think about how much more Saihara will care about Momota’s impending death than his. 

Ouma bites back a grimace because he’s dying and nothing’s real and everything’s fine. He retightens his focus and keeps writing, Momota hovering behind him, reading his every word over his shoulder. Everything’s fine.

No one mourns the wicked, and it’s too late to give an encore to paint himself as anything but.

-

All of his bravado drains with the poison coursing through him, bright and stinging. It makes his head dizzy and fills the world with stars, and he’s too weak to walk to the press himself so Momota has to carry him. His arms hold him steady because in his last moments, Ouma is finally as small and fragile as a child. 

He reaches a shaking hand up to run his fingers through the stiff hair on the back of Momota’s head. The taller boy echoes no protest when Ouma takes his first kiss with cracked lips coated in blood. Momota’s eyes swim with pity when he pulls away, and Ouma’s own mind can swim with nothing but pain.

Momota lays him down on the press, and Ouma thinks that the absolute best thing about kissing Momota is that he’s too rough and too loud and far too hard to mistake for Saihara. His heart flutters in his chest and all he sees are the poison stars winking in and out of his vision like stage lights. 

Momota’s still there for one shining moment, and Ouma tugs on his sleeve before he can leave him. His voice is a rasped whisper and the words, “At least I wasn’t boring, was I?” barely make it out.

His audience of one gives him a stiff nod. Ouma would ask for another kiss, but even on his deathbed, he has an image to maintain. 

The press falls, and the curtain closes on Ouma’s last performance.

**Author's Note:**

> Posting this was a trial with my slow internet, so apologies for any weirdness that may have happened!


End file.
